Regional Heterogeneity and U.S. Presidential Elections

Rashad Ahmed and Mohammad Pesaran

No 8615, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper develops a recursive model of voter turnout and voting outcomes at U.S. county level to investigate the socioeconomic determinants of recent U.S. presidential elections. It is shown that the relationship between many socioeconomic variables and voting outcomes is not uniform across U.S. regions. By allowing for regional heterogeneity and using high-dimensional variable selection algorithms, we can explain and correctly predict the unexpected 2016 Republican victory. Key factors explaining voting outcomes include incumbency effects, voter turnout, local economic performance, unemployment, poverty, educational attainment, house price changes, urban-rural scores, and international competitiveness. Our results corroborate evidence of ‘short-memory’ among voters: economic fluctuations realized a few months prior to the election are indeed powerful predictors of voting outcomes as compared to their longer- term analogues. The paper then presents real time forecasts for the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election based on data available at the end of July 2020 which are then updated based on data available as of mid-October.

Keywords: voter turnout; popular and electoral college votes; simultaneity and recursive identification; high dimensional forecasting models; Lasso; OCMT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 C55 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-for, nep-ore and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8615.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Regional Heterogeneity and U.S. Presidential Elections (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8615

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().